 My own basic perspective on the history of man is to place central importance on the great conflict which is internally waged between liberty and power. A conflict by the way which was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the 18th century. Marian Rothbard. This is the Liberty vs. Power podcast and the focus of this podcast is going to be to kind of expand on Rothbardian history. And for that we have Dr. Patrick Newman. One of the leading Rothbardian historians out there, the editor of Conceived in Liberty Volume 5 and the Progressive Era and the author of the new release Cronyism, Liberty vs. Power in Early America. Patrick, what does the Liberty vs. Power framework sort of mean to you as an economic historian, looking back at issues like Cronyism and looking at different eras of history? What does it mean for you when you're applying this into new work? Yeah, so I'm someone very influenced by Murray Rothbard, very influenced by his overall outlook on history, his overarching narratives, etc. And so for me, studying Cronyism, the history of, excuse not the history, just the special interest policies that benefit concentrated groups at the expense of the overall public, the Liberty vs. Power theory is very important when analyzing Cronyism in early American history or just analyzing early American history in general. Because the Liberty vs. Power theory is that history is a clash between the forces of smaller government, right? This is Liberty and the forces of big government, big government and Cronyism, etc. There's the forces of power, right? So in early American history, this really does explain a lot of various legislation and the battles, the political and the economic battles that were going on. Because you did have a mass movement dedicated to libertarian goals, fighting Cronyism, fighting for a smaller government. This is America's libertarian heritage, it's its libertarian tradition. Murray Rothbard was always big on explaining this. That's why he spent five volumes writing a history of America during the colonial era, right? And so it's important to understand because even though today there might not be as big of a mass movement in favor of liberty or politicians who are genuinely dedicated to it, it still has relevance for today. We can still see examples of it. But really, I think the key to understanding American history is understanding that American history is intertwined with libertarianism. And one of the things I think is kind of fun about this is that, you know, sometimes even Rothbard's kind of criticized this by some, you know, I think usually unfair critics of kind of conspiracy theory sort of history, right? You kind of had the creature of Jekyll Island sort of analysis out there where, you know, when Rothbard's writing about the origins of the Federal Reserve, for example, you know, he names names. He identifies the elites, the motivations, you know, at hand that was guiding this policy. You know, you shared with me this great article that was actually published in Reason in 1977, whereas Rothbard sort of defending kind of the conspiracy theory sort of lens of history, and Murray described it as the conspiracy analyst and said that really what they're serving is as a praxeologist, that that is, he believes that people act purposefully, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes the steel industry lobbied for it. If a public works project is created, he hypothesized that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of conspiracy analysis who professes to believe that all events, at least in government, are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purpose of choice and planning. You know, this is something that really comes out throughout a lot of Rothbard's histories, and not only in the Conceived and Liberty series. Obviously, you published the fifth volume of, but he's got, really, his 20th century analysis is so baked in, so the conflicts between the Morgan family and the Rockefeller family, the influence of the Dallas brothers on international relations and the like. You know, it's something that I think is interesting where, again, this is something that can be dismissed by a certain type of scholar or even a libertarian as being a perhaps mean spirited or missing, you're applying bad motives, but yet if we're actually looking at the way the state operates, there is these underlying agendas that are behind so much of what is done, you know, within the wheels of power with the facade being of, you know, general welfare or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. I was always, that was one of the first Murray Rothbard articles I had read, conspiracy theory of history, you know, revisited and Rothbard goes through what he's really doing is he's applying Ludwig von Mises, his great mentor, his theory of thymology, right? So the science of praxeology is why, excuse me, praxeology is the science of studying the implications of human action, right? So I'm hungry, I want to eat a sandwich, and now we got to, you know, analyze the whole implications of that. Am I going to go buy a sandwich, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. Thymology, which Mises really fleshed out the most in his, one of his last great works, which is theory and history, is the study of understanding why humans acted. It's really kind of a fancy word for, we might think of psychologizing, so trying to understand the motivations of someone. So why did I eat this, you know, why did I want a sandwich with something that I had happened to me earlier in my life, or am I part of, you know, the sandwich lobby or you know, etc. And looking at understanding people's motivations, why they're making a choice. And this is especially relevant in the political arena, right, because a certain law is going to be passed. Okay, well, why was the law passed? A lot of economists will study historical, you know, history or various legislation, and they're just going to look at the economic effects of that. And very often they're not going to look at it correctly, but that's a whole different other, you know, side, you know, a whole different other podcast, basically. So a railroad that was created, you know, railroad legislation in the 1860s. An economic historian is going to just say, all right, well, what are the quantitative effects on GDP of this, creating the railroads, right? They're not going to look as much at why were the railroads passed. What were the motivations that this railroad legislation, creating these railroads was, you know, what was the underlying motivation of various individuals. That requires the thymological perspective, which is looking at various, you know, primary sources. So documentation, understanding relevant actors' backgrounds, looking at, you know, their diaries or their correspondence, what are they trying to get out of something, etc. And that provides a much more richer overview or analysis of the particular type of legislation you're looking at. And this really shows that a larger legislation is much more crony than we are led to believe, right? Because, you know, they're much more developed, you know, based off of special interests trying to get something at the expense of the public. Because if you just look at what politician state is their motivation, it's always going to be in the public interest, right? If you want to push for some infrastructure bill, let's say, you have to say, well, this is going to expand the American economy. This will do all sorts of wonderful things, etc. But what you don't see from that statement is, okay, what are the various special interests that have lobbied for this? You know, who are they? What were they trying to get, etc. So Murray Rothbard's whole historical outlook, his analysis of various, you know, the political process, everything from elections to the pushing for various legislation. It's heavily Misesian. Mises himself might have not done this because he mainly focused on theory. But it's really Rothbard's whole historical analysis is his application of Mises's theory in history. And it's funny, I think this kind of goes directly to some of the critiques out there at the Austrian school. Oh, you know, they try to pontificate from their armchairs, you know, all of the economic, you know, an analysis in the world on that sort of stuff. And it kind of gets directed to that core of dividing economic theory and the kind of narrow sense and then economic history, you know, weaving in sort of the more complex fabric of human reality, you know, recognizing that we can't do controlled variables and the like, you know, it very much is that sort of Misesian foundation. George Pickering has a great sort of breakdown on the value of Rothbard's introduction to theory and history. That Rothbard wrote, which really kind of dives into the way that, you know, this Misesian understanding should be applied. Obviously, it played a big role in Rothbard's career. But I think one of the things that has also kind of helps your Rothbard being such a fascinating historical thinker on top of his political work, his, you know, his economic work and whatever, is that his background wasn't simply limited to the work of Mises in this regard, but also mentors like Joseph Dorfman, who was a great American economic historian in his own right. Can you touch on some of Dorfman's influence on Rothbard in the way that kind of played into kind of his understanding of American history? Yeah, so Joseph Dorfman was Rothbard's dissertation advisor. So Rothbard had gotten his PhD in economics at Columbia University back in the day when Rothbard was at Columbia in the mid 1940s, really around the end of World War II, tying in with the GI boom. Columbia University was one of the leading economics departments in the United States. It really was Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia. So Rothbard was, you know, immersing himself with the many of the elite scholars of the era. Joseph Dorfman was a noted historian of economic thought. He was what was known as an institutionalist. The meaning has changed since Rothbard's time, but really institutionalists are very big on fact-gathering and not being sort of anti-theory, anti-abstract theory. Much more theory needs to be contingent on a particular historical episode, and you need to first gather a bunch of information before you can then basically devise some sort of explanatory hypothesis, etc. And so Joseph Dorfman had written a multi-volume work, The Economic Mind in American Civilization. For those of you who can get a copy of this, I believe there are PDFs of it online through Mises.org, and you're interested in the material. I recommend that you read it, The Economic Mind in American Civilization. It's this great book. I used it a lot in my own book, Chronism. And Dorfman, I think, really taught Rothbard to appreciate just sort of being very intensive with facts, so collecting a lot of information, showing the various connections an individual has, who this person talking about economic theory, what were his connections that he owned stock in some various companies that influenced his outlook? Joseph Dorfman did specialize in this, that was apparent in his own The Economic Mind series, and Rothbard learned a lot from him. So you can see Dorfman's influence on Rothbard's The Panic of 1819. This was his dissertation. In the 1960s, Joseph Dorfman invited Rothbard. Rothbard was an attendee at a conference on American history, and Rothbard actually commented on Joseph Dorfman's own work, because Rothbard, again, was very knowledgeable about the 1810s and the 1820s because of his dissertation. So Joseph Dorfman really had a major influence on Rothbard. That's why if you look at his history of economic thought, Rothbard's own series, the two-volume series, an Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought, he dedicates the book, I believe, to Joseph Dorfman and Ludwig von Mises, both. And that just shows how much influence Dorfman had on Rothbard. One of the things I think is also interesting about Rothbard, I know it plays out in the progressive era with his analysis on the third political system and things like that. It was Leonard Ligio, he's got an interesting article about Rothbard and Jacksonian banking that kind of ties into Rothbard's experience with Dorfman and the like. But Ligio mentions that Murray Rothbard was very deeply read in the new political history of kind of the first half of the 1900s on the ethno-religious approach to political culture. And I think that's interesting when we think about things in that liberty versus power narrative, that you have not only the political machinations of those in power, rewarding cronies, having their own motivations, but they're also dealing with kind of a different cultural trends within the people themselves, the public itself. And this often plays out in the way that different political parties, what ends up fueling their strength or leading to their downfall, right, that there are larger cultural dynamics at play that can often overthrow certain political regimes by going too far from where the public is. Can you speak a little bit to the dynamic of kind of the alter and thrown dynamic that also played a heavy role in sort of Rothbard's analysis of American history? Yeah, so firstly, the new political history, this was a very influential field in the 1970s trying to explain why people voted and basically argued that voting patterns could be determined by someone's ethno-religious background, whether or not they were German Lutheran or an Irish Catholic, et cetera. And this was something that had always fascinated Rothbard, particularly when understanding or trying to understand the 1800s in this party system of this very intense competition. Everyone was really interested, as Rothbard explained that I always love this in his own lectures. He said, you know, you had people, everybody and their brothers, brother was voting, you know, was writing some pamphlet on silver legislation or tariffs or whatever. And he's like, why were people so interested in economics back then? He said, I can't even get my own students to be interested in this. And you're a captive audience, right? So he's speaking to his students. He's basically saying like, why aren't you guys interested? So I just love that that part especially. But yeah, this is this is it's important. Rothbard wanted to actually explain that ideology did matter. Okay, ideology still does matter in a sense that at least they can return. People do vote based off of their ideological convictions. People do vote or they're more energized by more economic issues when they can somehow be tied into local more cultural issues. And we can even see this today, especially with COVID and in mask mandates and everything where your average person really doesn't care about the national debt or monetary policy. That's something that's really hard to energize people about, right? They might care about if prices at the gasoline station are rising, but they do care about school closures, mask mandates. That stuff's easy to understand. That stuff really hits home. Oh, am I being forced to take a vaccine or not, right? That's a lot easier to understand than what's this spending bill going to do to interest rates in two years? Like, you know, your average person doesn't really know that, right? So this is something that Rothbard had used in his own history, trying to analyze the ethnic background of various voting blocks. So he famously argued that really the Democratic Party, which was the libertarian party in the 1800s, was sustained by liturgical voters. So voters such as Irish Catholics and German Lutherans, as opposed to the political parties of power, such as the Whigs and Republicans, that were sustained by pietists, these evangelicals who wanted to save the world so they could save themselves, right? And that relied, you know, that meant stamping out sin, as well as passing various economic reforms. So that was a very big component of Murray Rothbard's historical outlook. The Alliance of Throne and Alter is also another crucial component of Rothbard's historical outlook. I really enjoy teaching this to my own students and explaining its relevance to today. The Alliance of Throne and Alter is basically this connection or the relationship between the leader of the government, such as the king, and a court intellectual, such as the priest. So back in the day, in order for the king to justify his various actions to the public, he would enlist priests and other sort of religious intellectuals to say, well, the king is divine. The king's words are directly from God. In order to save yourself, you have to listen to the king. You have to be conscripted by him. You have to pay taxes, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't have that overt religious emphasis anymore, but we still have a very similar principle where court intellectuals now, they might not be a priest, but they're going to be a political scientist or an economist who's going to say, well, you have to listen to our government, you know, you have to listen to your government rulers because their policies are going to increase GDP and it's going to make people better offered. It's going to reduce income inequality or it will save the environment or something like that. Or they might be a public health expert declaring themselves to be the embodiment of science. Yes, exactly. You know, they're saying, well, you have to listen to me. I have, you know, I am the one basically, you know, voice in the scientific discourse and et cetera. And why do they argue this? Why are so many intellectuals attached to the system? Well, it's very related to the point that Rothbard makes that I find very true. It's that, well, intellectuals are supportive of this in the same way that they're critical of capitalism because they know that capitalism won't really provide a demand for their services. So instead they're going to justify state intervention because the state will turn around and scratch their back. The king would set aside tax money to build a new church for the priest. Nowadays, we employ various intellectuals, academics, economists, political scientists, historians, policy walks, whatever, at state universities, at large endowed think tanks in the government and so on. Right? So they're able to justify their own employment when they support various interventions. Yeah, I believe it was true a couple of years ago. I doubt it has gone down ever since, but I believe the largest source of grant money for economists was from the Federal Reserve system. Surprise, surprise, very few economists out there, depending on such money or is calling for ending the Fed or anything like that. And I think particularly right now, especially right now, given how vivid sort of the tentacles of the technocracy between the public health authorities between everything we've seen from the central bank system and the Fed and everything like that. I think this is one of the things that leads, you know, let's call it kind of Rothbardian libertarianism, to carry, to be able to motivate people in a way that perhaps other forms of libertarianism doesn't. It seems that there's a lot of libertarians out there that tend to agree with the end result of a lot of government plans. They tend to believe that on all, they might not always get things right, but the state more or less is a entity trying to work in the public interest, where it very much is that Rothbardian perspective that no, the state is a bunch of, you know, thieves writ large, that they are ripping us off, and that they're doing so that you're using all these side justifications to just simply defend ultimately what are self serving policies. And then even if there is a degree to which some of these people generally believe that out giving more more power to a Fauci or to the Fed, you know, might have, you know, under, you know, underlying public policy benefits that looking at the operations of the state from the cynical perspective is more often than not going to lead you to more truthful outcomes than assuming good intentions. I remember when Dr. Hans Hermann Hoppe gave a talk at the 35th anniversary in New York City a couple years ago. He talked about Rothbard's interest in revisionist history and the importance that he placed on it was something that, you know, Rothbard's influence awoken him to the importance of looking back at, you know, the doctrinaire historical narrative and recognizing how a lot of the way that it is framed within traditional textbooks hides a lot of these underlying sins of the state. And again, I think this goes directly to, you know, what ends up fueling a lot of that sort of heroic aspect of us against, you know, the regime that I think kind of goes a long way on why Rothbard continues to resonate so many decades after his passing. Yeah, that's a very good point that, you know, Rothbard's perspective in many ways is unique, or at least it's, he emphasizes many points people don't, they might agree with but they don't place as much weight on traditionally in a lot of free market economics, you know, textbooks. In many cases, even in Mises' work, it's you assume, well, they got the best of intentions, you assume what they're saying is true. And then you really talk about unintended consequences so that, well, good intentions don't lead to good results. So a politician is pushing for minimum wage because they think it will increase employment, it'll help people who are poor off, and then it will actually, well, turns out that it leads to unemployment and it hurts those people, et cetera, et cetera. So, well, you kind of go through this cute little analysis and so on. And, well, I think that explains part of it. I think certainly some politicians or some people, they do have good intentions or at least they think they're helping. But for a lot of things, even including the same politicians, well, they also are pushing for their own special interests. Even if you take the minimum wage, for example, the actual origins of the minimum wage during the progressive era, first on the state level in the 1910s and then on the federal level in the 1930s, really at the state level, it was designed to unemployed people. It was designed to unemployed immigrants and women and children who are competing with the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant unions, the male, the white men, the blue collar working class, so to speak, who was pushing for various restrictions on immigration and so on in order to keep their own wages high. The minimum wage is just another tool for that. So you see, well, the cronyism is still there, right? The cronyism explains the minimum wage. And in many ways, it could probably even explain some of the minimum wage debates. When you look at who are the biggest proponents of minimum wage increases, it's always unions. Even though, curiously enough, many of these unions are already paying their workers at prices, at wages higher than the minimum wage they're advocating for. So you say, okay, well, why are unions that are paying their own members, their own members are earning $20 an hour with the company that the union's working for, why are they pushing to raise the minimum wage to $10 or $15? Well, it comes from the fact that they know if you raise the wage of competition artificially, you're going to make them less attractive for employers to hire. So if you raise the price of teenagers, you make them unprofitable for a business to hire, they're going to switch to slightly higher unionized members, increasing the demand for those workers, right? So you go, oh, okay, so maybe it isn't these, you know, these good intentions lead to good results. It's kind of the bad intentions. And this is something that Rothbard always emphasized, and I think it's important to look at because this is really understanding people's motivations. Okay, this is really just engaging in that practice, you know, the science that means this, you know, articulated thymology and really just applying it. And when you do that, you get a much richer understanding of the world. Unlike praxeology, which is very logic based abstract, you don't need empirical evidence. This, of course, is very empirical. You have to constantly be reading empirical information, looking at motivations, changing your hypotheses, etc. But when you do this enough and you get the right explanation, you hit on it, it really does open minds. And that's why I think it's so important to explain cronyism, explain Mises' thymology, etc., to as many people as we can. And of course, when we talk about this dynamic of, you know, large corporations taking advantage of the public, this is something that's not necessarily exclusively libertarian in terms of its application, right? And I know some of the conversations we've had off air, you know, this liberty versus power framework that Rothbard uses in history, it's not necessarily unique to him. I love reading Gore Vidal's historical novels. He kind of takes a similar sort of cynical approach with his narratives of empire highlighting, you know, kind of the general erosion of the republic into the state that we have now. You know, one of the great historical books about the Jacksonian era is Liberty in Power by Harry Watson. Reading this is clearly not, you know, some sort of laissez-faire libertarian in the truest sense. There is this kind of constant dynamic amongst some left economists as well. I know, I believe, one of the big battles that Joseph Dorfman had that kind of inspired Murray early on was a narrative that was going on amongst prominent award-winning economists trying to make the current wave of LBJ-style liberal, and that sense politics trying to tie that to the Jacksonian tradition where Dorfman kind of really highlighted an alternative view that was pretty compelling in terms of the underlying evidence. There is a constant battle here, and I think this is why Rothbard's history is something that we should be motivated by and why I'm glad people like yourself are building upon that tradition, is that ultimately there is a cultural war aspect of this economic history. Ryan MacMacon last year had a great article about economics as a cultural war issue that good history and good economics, fundamentally, it plays the role of illustrating for your average person. Again, who is the group of people ripping you off? And this is something that obviously the left has been able to hijack in its own way. I think of Howard Zinn's people's history in the United States, right? That's kind of an ideological history for a certain position. Rothbard is sort of the counterbalance to that. And so can you kind of build off of the way that you see historical analysis playing out, not only in just having a better understanding of what really happened, but in terms of perhaps some of these cultural war divides that we have going on in the country right now? Yeah, so there's a lot of good stuff to discuss there. The Liberty versus Power theory, or what I call a theory, as I said, I think Rothbard. But something that I try to argue in my book, as Rothbard did, is that this was actually something that not only older historians spoke about, most famously Lord Acton, you could say, but also contemporaries. So Bernard Bellin, who was the dissertation advisor of Gordon Wood and other famous American historian, both of them wrote on this and both of them discussed that Americans back in the day, they really did see things through this lens of liberty and power, right? They viewed liberty as the source of all sorts of inspiration and growth and flourishing. Well, power was this cancerous tumor. It was literally encroaching on everything. It was corrupting. And that's why this has been, you see, in depicting a central bank is this massive hydra of all sorts of tentacles, right? That's the Jacksonians did because they still, they too viewed things in terms of this Liberty versus Power framework. It's important to know. And this is something I try and do in my book or show that, yeah, this theme, this is people actually not only did hold this perspective, but it actually is a good explanation of why things proceeded or how things proceeded in the way they did. Because historians frequently try to look back on the past and sort of take maybe a current issue in the present. And so, well, it actually has this long and storied history. So, you know, obviously a libertarian such as myself is going to look back at America's libertarian tradition. Someone who such as Arthur Schlesinger, who is that historian you were mentioning, who's trying to argue that back in the days of FDR, the New Deal. Well, FDR is really in many ways, he can be his heritage, you know, that this interventionist Democrat perspective fighting for the common man against the entrenched interest, the aristocracy. Well, he's really, you know, Andrew Jackson is similar to FDR, right? And so that took Joseph Dorfman to say, well, no, Andrew Jackson, he was fighting the, when he was fighting, you know, these large businesses or these entrenched interests. It wasn't because of capitalism, it was because they had various government privileges, right? And you see this with Howard Zinn and other historians nowadays, so because critical race theory is very important and the big 1619 project and everything. So you're going to look back into history and you're going to see, well, there were people who were arguing our perspective that, you know, race relations was this big issue and all sorts of other stuff. And that's why America history is all doom, gloom and boom, so to speak. And it's important to obviously, you know, respectfully engage the literature, at least as respectfully as we can and try and show that, well, that's incorrect. There's actually, you know, this is a much more convincing explanation of what happened because there are parallels with the modern day cultural wars, etc. Because people are always trying to look back into history and sort of in order to support their own viewpoint. So we do see, you know, these themes, it's not trying to look back into, oh, you know, trying to paint Andrew Jackson as a proto FDR guy. Now it's, let's try and paint Andrew Jackson as some sort of genocidal maniac or whatever, which is not true. That's just a distortion of the facts. And it's important to really combat these and to produce good history because history is how history absolutely influences our perspective on the present day. And I think as libertarians, the preservation of American history is particularly important because I know that Murray was very proud of the American Revolution, you know, discussing it as a people's war, a battle for, you know, liberation. And I think that's, you know, there are so few cultures that are, you know, really cultivated, conceived in liberty, so to speak. And that, you know, I think that it is not a coincidence that a lot of, you know, the degree to which the current progressive left is trying to go after everyone, right? And the whole thing is that they kind of overplay their hand to a certain extent. It's one thing to criticize Andrew Jackson based off of, you know, the treatment of Native Americans or going after Thomas Jefferson for being a slave holder. But once, you know, Louis von Mises and Milton Friedman and James Buchanan are all, you know, frossing racists that are trying to, you know, put in place a system of, you know, continual oppression through an embrace of charter schools or whatever some of these modern new histories are. You kind of see exactly, you know, if you're a hammer, everything's a nail, right? And so if you're a leftist, everything's a racist. But again, though, we're seeing an amplification of this battle within this entire new sort of era of really left wing conspiracy theories of the Nancy McClain's, of the Quinn Sabodians, of the 1619 project. And again, I think it's interesting, I think it is through a detriment that there are not more people doing the work that you have done. Our friend, Chris Calton, with his great podcast a few years ago, taking a Misesi and Rothbardian lens of history. You know, one of the things that I think has always led to the Austrian tradition being so rich and vibrant was, you know, obviously back at the University of Vienna, you didn't simply specialize in economists, you know, Mises studied law and he studied history, he studied philosophy and the like, and that it is precisely the contributions that Austrian thought provides, not simply to economics narrowly, but to political science, as Ryan McMacon often argues, to history, to these other social disciplines, that you need all of them to really defend any of them. And simply defending things on purely economic grounds isn't enough, particularly when the other side is able to, you know, just kind of pitch their own very simplistic narrative. We have to have our own pushback, you know, against that. And that's why I think, again, that this liberty versus power narrative is so important, providing that important lens, right. When we think about Marxism, for example, it's his class theory really is what has, I think, kind of continued that tradition, no matter the failings of socialism in a practical realm, it's that politics of envy, that of, you know, the Poletaria versus the bourgeoisie that has now been kind of remade over in so many different ways, you know, cultural Marxism, et cetera, et cetera. But it's this constant oppressor versus oppressor, oppressor versus the oppressed dynamic that continues to give fuel to his cause. It is precisely what Rothbard does with his history that I think keeps this dynamic flame alive in this framework. Do you think that we need more historians, more social scientists broadly to help kind of keep the Austrian tradition alive today, keep it thriving today? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think history, philosophy, political science, very important. I think we need more historians. I think history in particular, at the supporter summit, I, when the book was released, cronies were released, I explained, yeah, I gave at least my case for why someone in 2021 would profit from reading a book that ends in 1849, right. So what's the, what could someone learn? And I explained, well, history provides lots of case studies of cronyism or of the free market or the quasi free market working. History is also interesting. So it's easy to engage people. Economics can be very theoretically abstract. Okay. Then there's also, you know, again, modern, modern political battles on the other side, you know, the other side is waging their various political battles using history. We've seen this with the 1619 project and other things. So in order to influence someone on current events such as on inflation, people are looking back on the 1970s. Then again, you have someone Paul Krugman looking back on the inflation after World War two, etc. So in order to basically, you know, illuminate our perspective on the present, we have to look back at the past. Okay. And then the last reason I gave is I think that I said, you know, there's light at the end of the tunnel, you had reform movements in the past. But all of that was trying to emphasize the importance of history, why we need historians, etc. Because this, you know, history is how we learn your average person, they have an anti capitalist pro interventionist bias because of the various history classes they've taken, right? Or they've slowly been ingrained with, you know, oh, of course, we all need to wear face masks because if we didn't wear face masks, and the government didn't take care of our health. Well, we still have rats falling into, you know, being made into sausages and, and, you know, people falling into vats that were turned into meat and all sorts of stuff like that. So that's very important. History is a crucial discipline that needs to be basically continue to defend. It relates to something Rothbard had described as at various points in time as a science of liberty might be more accurately described as sciences, sciences of liberty. But it was his way of describing the overarching framework of libertarianism which not only included economic history also, excuse me, not only included economic theory, but also included history, economic history, political science, sociology, etc. And showing how all of these disciplines kind of reinforce each other and support this idea of a voluntary society that the free market provides the greatest human flourishing as opposed to the government, etc. So it's important to realize that it's a unified, it's a unified front, so to speak. You have to be moving along on all the frontiers in order to really accomplish your objectives. And this is why the Journal of Libertarian Studies as one of the platforms for a lot of the research in this area. Recently, we brought it back a few years ago with Libertarian Scholars Conference that we haven't held the last couple of years because usually it's a New York thing and it hasn't been very friendly territory ever since early 2020. But I think there's a lot of value for anyone out there interested in looking at the non-economic parts of Mises Institute content. Some of the old JLS articles have some really fascinating contributions by all sorts of great names on history, theory and the like, and get some really interesting things out there. So for the first season of Liberty vs. Power, we are going to be diving into your newest book, Cronyism, Liberty vs. Power in Early America. We're going to be taking it part by part. We're going to allow you to kind of expand on some of the historical anecdotes that you've brought in and kind of highlight some of the important takeaways. Have this provide a role of a cliff notes, if you will, but also just a platform for expanding upon what pages you couldn't get all in there. I know in your early draft of the book, it was much larger than the final product. Can you talk about just a little bit about the work that you put into the book itself? Obviously, you had a tremendous amount of familiarity with Conceived in Liberty and Rothbard's history of Early America. But as a last little tease, can you just talk about a little bit about the production of cronyism and your process throughout writing it? Yeah, so I'm an economist. I don't believe in the labor theory of value, but I can't tell you I worked hard on it. But so that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good book. But hopefully it might give an indicator. Yeah, this is something that I've spent the past two years working on. I was asked to write a history of crony capitalism. And I decided to focus initially on early American history before moving on to later historical periods, which I'm currently researching right now. This book really is my attempt to try to flesh out that science of liberty that Rothbard had argued for. Sort of continue the story of Conceived in Liberty and basically try to explain it, update it with new source material, et cetera. And this is something that I'm very happy about, very proud of. I'm glad that various people have been reading it or been buying the book, et cetera. And this really just shows that there are people who are interested in this material. There is a natural audience for history and for a study of cronyism. And this is one of the ways that I think is the best way of convincing people the benefits of the free market and libertarianism. Because this is something Rothbard had explained when he was researching American history. And most people don't learn through economics. They learn through case studies, et cetera. So I had written this big book of 550 pages over about two years. But I was advised, particularly by Chris Colton, who you mentioned, to cut it down really just to squeeze out some extraneous facts or improve the writing. And it really did improve the quality. So in many ways, it's a labor of love. And I'm very happy to be going on this podcast and talking about it with you. Hopefully, this is a nice little taste of what we're looking to bring to the table here with the Liberty vs. Power podcast. I'm very excited to be talking with you more going forward about not only your book, but other fascinating little periods of American history, providing perspectives that only a Rothbardian truly can. With that being said, this has been the inauguration of Liberty vs. Power. I hope you'll join us for future episodes. And as always, if you like this and want more content, you can find articles, podcasts, lectures and more at Mises.org. Thank you very much.